Re-drawing the Map? can be discerned at all. Thirdly, it would be feasible to take a semi-historical
approach, and ask what sort of world or society is represented within the
texts as transmitted. Fourthly, one might enquire what external testimony
to the composition of the individual works there is, and examine how far
we can reconstruct from non-rabbinic evidence, whether Christian or pagan
observers, or contemporary documents or archaeological remains, evidence
for the nature of the wider society within which these canonical works seem
to have been composed. As regards late antique Babylonia, the answer seems
to be that we hardly know anything which casts any external light on the
context. As regards Palestine, it must seem astonishing to any outside ob-
server that the main historical account of the birth of the Mishnah is pro-
vided by a letter addressed to the Jewish congregation of Kairouan in ,
and written by a Babylonian rabbi, Gaon Sherira. It is a serious question (and
not merely a rhetorical one) to ask what genuine historical knowledge about
Roman Palestine more than seven centuries earlier could possibly have been
available to him.
Fifthly, insofar as we can, we could take each work in its context, while
simultaneously using it as providing a view of the wider society, Jewish or
non-Jewish, and deploying the external archaeological and documentary evi-
dence as a tool for interpreting it. A model is already present, namely Martin
Goodman’sState and Subject in Roman Galilee,^24 applying this procedure to
the Mishnah. But even if we assume that we can reliably date the Mishnah
to around , it itself looks back to the activity and role of generations of
rabbis, apparently going back to the period immediately after the first re-
volt, of..–/. Even over this relatively short time-span, and within a
quite well-known wider context, major problems arise. What external evi-
dence have we that persons with the title ‘‘rabbi’’ did function in Palestinian
Jewish society? In fact the earliest documentary evidence, quite extensive,
comes from the Jewish necropolis of Beth-Shearim, whose own dating prob-
ably needs review, but may be taken (provisionally) as the third century. By
contrast, in the entire corpus of documentary papyri and parchments of the
period from the s to the s, referred to earlier, not a single rabbi ap-
pears.^25 No less striking is the observation which we owe to Hannah Cotton,
namely the absence of any Jewish courts in any form from legal documents,
whether written in Greek or in a Semitic language.^26
. M. Goodman,State and Society in Roman Galilee^2 ().
. For all these points, see now in more detail the review article referred to in n. .
. H. M. Cotton and A. Yardeni,Aramaic,HebrewandGreekDocumentaryTextsfromNaḥal
Ḥever and Other Sites(DJD XXVII, ), .